Introduction - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 4

interaction, user interface and experience, and games user research in
order to make dynamite tutorials that help their players enjoy their
games. he takeaway from the topic is a list of easy-to-implement
changes that can make a huge difference in how players receive your
games, which can be located in Chapter 8 if you are particularly impa-
tient. I hope you will take the time to read through, though, and see
that a little learning can go a long way to helping your players have a
great time.
Video Game Tutorials
The introductory chapter intends to demonstrate tutorials to the
player, starting with discussion of the first-ever tutorials in games like
Half- Life and drawing on where these came from. Early tutorials con-
sisted primarily of instruction booklets, as older systems lacked the
power to display much on the screen. As our devices have changed,
so have our methods of learning, and newer tutorials often use special
“tutorial levels” or pop-ups to teach players how to play the game.
Unfortunately, these are outdated teaching methods, and these sorts
of behavioral techniques are drastically different from what modern
learners expect or require. This chapter addresses what tutorials are,
where they came from, where they are going, and why people think
they suck.
Imagine, if you can, the very first time you ever played a game. Not
a video game, but a game of any kind. For me, my earliest memories
of playing games are of the sort of Pac- Man on Atari with my dad,
who would die a few years later. Now that I think of it, it was probably
Ms. Pac- Man ™ because I played that one recently and the memories
came rushing back. While this seems like a bit of a sob story, what's
important to me is not the memory of playing with someone who I
lost, but the imprint that it left on me. Just like this game, every other
game I would ever pick up had one thing in common: I had to learn
how to play. In the early days of playing Ms. Pac-Man as a 4-year-old
with my dad, or The Legend of Zelda ™ as a 5-year-old with my mom,
I had capable adults there, familiar with my learning style, who cared
deeply about me—and they were more than willing to instruct me in
how to play the game. These were my first experiences with learning
to play.